Thumos is a Greek word that we often translate as "spiritedness" or "passion." It implies a spirit of contention or fight, like having a beer with your buddy and loudly insisting that Dylan was cooler than the Beatles. This is an excuse for spirited posts that follow my more or (often) less disciplined passions.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

We just finished The Da Vinci Code. At the risk of tedium for those who have already been overexposed to this mediocrity, there is a underlying ideological thread that needs examination that we think has gone neglected. Consider the traditional Christian world story:

God creates a world that is good, with Man at the pinacle of the natural world, but through a primordial disaster of Man's doing, evil comes into it, condemning human history to an endless cycle of death and misery. God sends His Son into the world to become a man. Through the heroic salvific passion and death of the Son, Man and his world are sanctified and saved. From God the Father and through the resurrected Son, the Spirit comes into human history, acting most efficacious through one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, a leaven that will bring about the ultimate and total restoration of God's Kingdom throughout the Cosmos in the Eschaton.

Contrast that with this founding back story:
An ancient wrong has been committed. A Great Man of superior genetics advocates a superior way of life, in harmony with the natural order, urging men to strive for perfection and embrace the immanent feminine divine of the earth. He is killed by an ignorant mob, but he fathers a child. The Man's genetically superior bloodline is secretly preserved against the defilement of the great unwashed masses. Meanwhile, an international conspiracy forms which maintains mediocrity and debasement. This conspiracy oppressed the pure Bloodline of the Great Man and keeps it from its rightful position: ruling the land where it has thrived for centuries.

The genetic element is subtle, but it's there -- the heroine's intellectual gifts seem clearly to be inherited from her father, and so on up the bloodline. The parallels with fascism are illuminating.

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Excellent article on the sources of Muslim rage in Britain and throughout the world. Dalrymple is an excellent writer and admirably forthright. We find his gloss on Christian history is a bit abbreviated -- if he were less dismissive of the achievements of the Christian West qua Christian, he might be less mystified as to why Islam has not exactly recapitulated Christianity's development. But there's no denying the strength of this piece. Particularly telling are his observations on the plight of Islamic women and the character of Muslims incarcerated in Britain.